Monday, 29 December 2014

If
you’re lying awake in bed, and you look over at your sleeping partner
with their tongue hanging out, snoring, making odd farty noises, and
your heart starts beating faster and you think, “Of course! What a
brilliant idea for a horror story,” then congratulations, you have a
genuine muse on your hands.

Sadly,
that’s not the case for everyone. Having someone who can inspire great
ideas and put thoughts in your head that lead to marvellous stories is
something we would all love, but the muse as an independent being who
feeds out creativity is a rare and unreliable creation.

Monday, 15 December 2014

Nobody likes a perfect character.
Someone who is super good at everything and gets everything right is annoying.

Even the most suave secret agents
of indestructible superheroes need to make mistakes in order to make the story
interesting.

There are two parts to using
wrongness in a story. There’s the actual mistake (which sometimes isn’t known
to be a mistake at the time), and there’s the consequences of the mistake,
usually forcing the character to deal with powerful feeling of guilt or regret.

Monday, 8 December 2014

The
Reversal is a technique when things appear to be going one way, but
they end up going another. It helps stories avoid being predictable and
you can use it to subvert clichés. It also pulls the reader deeper into
the story.

In
its most familiar form a reversal is a plot twist, usually big and
important. You thought the murderer was Dave, everything pointed to it
being Dave. But it was BILL!

What
you can do though is use it in a more simple, subtle form, to keep a
reader engaged and wondering what will happen next. This is especially
useful in genre fiction where readers who are familiar with the form
start guessing what happens next and rapidly lose interest.

Monday, 1 December 2014

Taking a seasonal break, in the meantime here's one from the vault first posted in October 2012. See you in the New Year.

The idea that the more words used
the clearer the meaning becomes is one that trips up a lot of writers.

Not that additional details are
always a bad thing, but the ‘a little more information couldn’t hurt’ approach
is very definitely wrong. It can very much hurt.

If I want to visit you then there
is a minimum amount of info (street and house number), and an optimum amount (best
route, which exit to take) that I need. And then there’s an excessive amount (the name of
your neighbour’s dog).

On the other hand, what
difference does it make if you mention the neighbour’s dog? It’s not going to
make the address harder to find.